snap-and-go

Two versions of a slider supposed to help users drag the knob to the snap location: (a) The problem: Traditional snapping warps the knob of this slider to the target whenever close, making it impossible to place the knob in the areas marked inaccessible (b) The proposed solution: Snap-and-go inserts additional motor space at the snap location, thereby keeping all slider positions accessible.

Snapping is a widely used technique that helps users position graphical objects precisely, e.g., to align them with a grid or other graphical objects. Unfortunately, whenever users want to position a dragged object close to such an aligned location, they first need to deactivate snapping. We propose snap-and-go, a snapping technique that overcomes this limitation. By merely stopping dragged objects at aligned positions, rather than “warping” them there, snap-and-go helps users align objects, yet still allows placing dragged objects anywhere else. While this approach of inserting additional motor space renders snap-and-go slightly slower than traditional snapping, snap-and-go simplifies the user interface by eliminating the need for a deactivation option and thereby allows introducing snapping to application scenarios where traditional snapping is inapplicable. In our user studies, participants were able to align objects up to 138% (1D) and 231% (2D) faster with snap-and-go than without and snap-and-go proved robust against the presence of distracting snap targets.

Baudisch, P., Cutrell, E., Hinckley, K., and Eversole, A. Snap-and-go: Helping Users Align Objects Without the Modality of Traditional Snapping. In Proceedings of CHI 2005, Portland, OR, Apr 2005, pp. 301-310. PDF (1.3M) | PPT (1.3M)           NOMINATED FOR CHI 2005 BEST PAPER AWARD